A great figure of the Latin American left, Jacobo Timerman, the former editor of the newspaper La Opinión of Buenos Aires, who had brought witness against the hell of the Argentine generals in his wonderful book “Prisoner without a name, cell without number”, wrote about “the belief that becomes a selfish and unconscious refusal to help Cuba, poor, alone, silent, the last Stalinist island in a world that is almost completely liberated.”
The real history of Cuba, which has not yet been released, was dissolved in a midsummer dream skillfully built by Castro's stupid admirers in the West. Then there is the true story of the island-regime, that of the poet Armando Valladares, sentenced to thirty years, a hero.
The real Cuba is that of the dissidents, such as Guillermo Fariñas, a psychologist and independent journalist, and Oscar Biscet, the heroic doctor on the island where there are more abortions than births. Half a million Cubans passed through the Gulag of Fidel Castro in Cuba. In comparison to the total population of the island that is eleven million, the Castro dictatorship boasted the highest per capita political incarceration rate in the world.
Castro institutionalized torture against the “anti-socialist elements”. Not to mention the systematic repression, brutal and disproportionate with regard to the minimum of dissent. And to compensate for the lack of consumer goods there was always a generous supply of Communist propaganda.
The list of US celebrities who justified this Gulag is astonishing. Dan Rather called Fidel Castro “the Elvis of Cuba”, “Castro has brought literacy and a large rate of health care in his country” (Barbara Walters)”, “Castro is one of the wisest men in the world”, (Oliver Stone), “Fidel, I love you” (Francis Ford Coppola), and we could continue by mentioning Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss.
And Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to care that Cuba has fewer per capita phones than Papua, New Guinea and fewer Internet connections than Uganda.
According to the Cuba Archive Project, until 2005 on the island there were 9,240 “political deaths”. Armando Lago, a Harvard trained economist and vice president of the Cuba Archive Project, estimates that 78,000 people have died trying to flee from the Caribbean island (20 percent of the original Cuban population lives abroad). 5,600 Cubans were executed, 1,200 were eliminated in “extrajudicial executions” (five times higher than Augusto Pinochet's record).
It is difficult to quantify the number of homosexuals imprisoned in concentration camps or the number of books buried in the archives (the preferred method under Communism, while the Nazis burned them).
All numbers are forgotten in favour of dancing in the streets of L’Havana. Because, as the most famous Italian ballet dancer Carla Fracci said “Castro is a dictator, I know, but I do not forget that ballet is highly regarded in socialist countries”.
The ballet…of course.